“Stalin essentially did believe (in the official ideology, in his role as an honest leader, in the guilt of the accused and so on), and he did not in actuality control events (the results of his own actions frequently shocked him).” – Lars T. Lih has proposed a distressing conclusion: ‘The people of the Soviet Union would probably have been better off if Stalin had been more cynical than he was.’ There is, however, a different way of reading Stalin’s ‘belief: it was not that he ‘personally’ believed, but he wanted the big Other to believe. Lih himself points in this direction when he condones Robert Tucker’s amazement at how much pain and suffering went into the mass production of confessions during 1937. These confessions served no earthly purpose; they were promptlyfiledaway and forgotten. Tucker speculates that Stalin insisted on these confessions as proof to posterity that his vision of a world filled with enemies was basically correct.10 What if, however, we take the statement that the extorted confessions ‘served no earthly purpose’ more literally: they were ‘filed away and forgotten’ because their actual addressee was not the people who were to come but the virtual ‘big Other’
SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1PDrrv8